Color Palette from Image
Upload an image and extract its dominant colors as hex swatches, entirely in your browser. Your image is never uploaded.
Pure browser JavaScript — uses FileReader and the Canvas getImageData API.
How to use this tool
- Choose an image file from your device.
- Set how many colors you want (2–12).
- Click Extract palette to see the dominant swatches with hex codes.
Upload an image and extract its dominant colors as hex swatches, entirely in your browser. Your image is never uploaded.
How it works
The Color Palette from Image tool reads the pixel data of any image you load and applies a color quantization algorithm to find the most visually dominant colors. The result is displayed as a set of swatches with their hex codes, which you can copy and use in design work.
Processing happens entirely in your browser using an HTML canvas. The image is drawn onto the canvas, the raw pixel array is read, and a clustering or median-cut algorithm groups similar colors together to identify the palette. No image data is ever sent to a server.
This tool is useful for brand color extraction, generating design tokens from a photo, matching text or UI colors to an image, or simply discovering what colors a photograph contains. It works with PNG, JPEG, WebP, and most other common image formats supported by your browser.
Worked example
Extract a brand palette from a logo
- Click Upload and select your logo file (PNG or JPEG).
- Wait a moment while the tool processes the pixel data.
- Review the swatches that appear -- the dominant colors are shown with their hex codes.
- Click a hex code to copy it to your clipboard, then paste it into your design tool.
A set of hex color codes matching the dominant colors of the logo, ready for use in a style guide.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Uploading images with large white or solid backgrounds, which dominate the palette and hide the meaningful colors.
- Expecting exact brand colors from a compressed JPEG -- compression artifacts shift pixel values, so results may vary slightly from the original hex values.
- Using the tool on images with very few distinct colors and expecting a diverse palette -- the output only reflects what is actually in the image.
Key terms
- Color quantization
- A technique that reduces the number of distinct colors in an image by grouping similar colors together, used here to find dominant palette colors.
- Hex color code
- A six-character code (e.g., #3A7BD5) that represents a color using red, green, and blue values in hexadecimal notation.
- Dominant color
- A color that appears frequently or covers a large area of an image, making it visually prominent.
Frequently asked questions
- How are dominant colors chosen?
- The image is downscaled to a small canvas, pixels are quantized into color buckets, and the most populated buckets are averaged into representative swatches.
- Is my image uploaded?
- No — everything runs locally with FileReader and Canvas. The image never leaves your device.